The pinnacle of the Global Olympic Committee apologized Wednesday for the group’s longtime failure to commemorate 11 Israeli athletes killed by means of Palestinian militants on the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Thomas Bach spoke at a rite in Tel Aviv marking the fiftieth anniversary of the fatal assault at the Munich Olympics, two weeks after Germany’s president apologized at a memorial rite in Germany for his nation’s screw ups ahead of, all over, and after the assault. On Sept. 5, 1972, the Palestinian workforce Black September attacked the Israeli Olympic delegation on the Munich Olympic Video games, killing 11 Israelis and a police officer. Israeli President Isaac Herzog mentioned the athletes have been “brutally murdered in chilly blood by means of a Palestinian 15 May Organization only for being Jews, simply because they have been Israelis.”
“This was once the instant that the Olympic torch was once snuffed out, and the five-ringed flag was once stained with blood,” he mentioned. Bach mentioned the assault in Munich was once certainly one of “the darkest days in Olympic historical past” and an attack at the Olympic Video games and its values. “The entirety that the Olympic Video games stand for was once shattered 50 years in the past with the horrific assault at the Israeli Olympic workforce.” He apologized for the various years it took the Global Olympic Committee to commemorate the Israeli sufferers “in a dignified method.”
A second of silence was once held on the opening rite of the Tokyo Video games closing yr — the primary time the Olympic Video games’ organizers marked the killing of the Israeli athletes in just about part a century. “For this ache, and for this anguish, that we brought about, I’m actually sorry,” Bach mentioned.
Remaining month the German govt reached an settlement to give you the households of the Munich sufferers a complete of 28 million euros (or $27.6 million) in reimbursement after the households had threatened to boycott this yr’s memorial rite.
